[Poster] Ongoing development of a user-centered, AR testbed in industry

Augmented reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data [1]. AR technology has seen the advent of smaller form factors, more powerful processors, higher resolution cameras, and distributed computation; the advent of technology like Google Glass and Epson Moverio BT-200 have generated renewed interest in the commercial domains. This new eyewear also extends the earlier capabilities of optical-/video-see through glasses with Bluetooth, Wifi, and 3G connectivity to remote databases. While there are as yet many significant technical hurdles for industry-specific AR systems that must be surmounted to ensure efficient operation, there are still numerous user-centric issues that still need to be addressed to enable the desired safety and efficiency potential of the technology itself. The issues themselves are plentiful, including ergonomic issues (size, weight of the augmented reality hardware, when dealing with glasses), user interface requirements (font sizes, lighting conditions impacting the legibility of text or the rendering of the digital content, interaction with tablets or glasses), and physiological issues (eye fatigue, user perception due to latency of content rendering, increased user workload). Our contribution in this paper is the presentation of an ongoing development of a user-centric, industrial testbed devoted to the requirements gathering, development, and assessment of AR technologies and presentation of two sample use cases. Our testbed is designed to investigate usability research questions related to AR, and this contribution constitutes some of our work in progress in developing this vision.